One of the few silver linings to being an alcoholic is, paradoxically, the lack of hangovers. Or hangovers as understood by ‘normals’. Unless you’re genuinely teetotal and have never had a drink in your life, you’ll be familiar with the drill: thumping headache, vomiting, dizziness, nausea – I don’t get any of that. Of course what you get instead is much worse: clinical depression, suicide ideation, physical and emotional anxiety of the most acute variety, feelings of deep existential terror and so on. I’m not sure how this works physiologically, but that’s how it is for me and, either way up, I can’t say I was sorry to see the back of the ‘classic’ hangover.
When all this first started going seriously wrong, I couldn’t work out was happening. The usual drunken version of myself was simply a more garrulous and (I fancied) wittier version of myself. But as my drinking problem became more serious I found a different character emerging, one I definitely didn’t like. Ill-humoured, deceptive, a bit too weird, angry, depressed and so on. And this would push on beyond the drunkenness into the next day and ‘be’ the hangover. No more headaches and vomiting for me: just a general lunatic instead. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I that found my whole character changing into something darker, slyer and more desperate. Now THAT’S a hangover.
I asked my sponsor at AA what the go was with all this. ‘This isn’t the normal drunken me’, I complained. ‘Dishonesty, suss behaviour, morbid drunkenness. What is happening to me?’ We were talking over car phones at the time and all I remember was him shouting a muffled word (he was eating cake, I later discovered): ‘Progressive Nick! It’s progressive!’. He meant, I realised, that alcoholism doesn’t just plateau at a stage where you’re simply drinking too much, but that it would keep getting worse and worse until it became an unbearable force in your life, a demon unleashed and almost impossible to re-tether without help.
Recognising that this was what was happening to me, was a moment of genuine epiphany, and I remembered the feeling I had when I read ‘The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. Halfway through I recall putting the book down for a bit and having a little word with myself, because I felt it describing – in one way or another – my own life. Friendly, well-liked and respectable Dr Jekyll, successful in every outward respect, feels a dark and inexplicable void in his soul, which he decides to ‘cure’ by mixing a potion that basically turns him into an increasingly unhinged lunatic who ends up murdering people. And whilst I’m not a violent drunk, I could feel that drinking led me now, not to a place of warmth and wit, but anger, resentment and despair. I was becoming Mr Hyde. God knows what Robert Louis Stevenson was on, but he knew the darkness of addiction when he saw it.
Some of the intellectual underpinning of Alcoholics Anonymous is influenced by the thoughts of Carl Jung, who argued that the addict feels – like Dr Jekyll – an inner emptiness, some dark void, which can easily, but only temporarily, be assuaged by chemical intervention. Basically, you go through life feeling like a piece of shit, get whatever your particular poison is down your throat and feel better for a while – before waking up feeling even worse. Hello, Mr Hyde. Jung, and AA, argued instead that spiritual intervention of some kind is really the only salvation for the addict. Of course, this is a problem because a lot of people run in terror at the ‘God’ word, and often with good cause. God gets mentioned a lot in AA meetings, and it makes many so uncomfortable that they simply can’t go back. I’ll write more on this tomorrow, as I’d prefer to keep these posts as short as possible and it’s a complicated and emotive subject.
Meanwhile, thanks to rehab, I haven’t had any kind of hangover for two weeks now.
One day at a time.
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